mirrors
by wallywesting
Summary: and water and glass and the smooth, unblemished metal of his blade/ or, things Desmond tries to avoid whilst in the Animus.


mirrors

Sharp features, skin kissed by the sun, eyes dark and narrowed, and this is not Desmond, even though it is Desmond who is staring into the bucket of water and this is the image being reflected back at him.

He panics, throwing the bucket away from him, the water in it spilling out and soaking immediately into the sandy, thirsty earth. The rafik pokes his head out into the courtyard to survey the mess, but the water is gone and the only evidence that it was ever there is the upturned bucket.

"Altaïr?" the man says.

Desmond stares down at his hands, rough and calloused, one digit less of a full set. He touches the stub and he feels it, he feels the touch, but these are not his hands, this not his body.

"Desynchronization imminent," Lucy's voice sounds from everywhere and nowhere, and Desmond's head is light, light as a feather, and somewhere he can hear an eagle call out into the desert, flying high above them. But when he looks up to try and spot it, he's no longer in the desert, he's in the Animus, and the glass screen is retracting.

Vidic storms off angrily, muttering darkly under his breath. Desmond sits up and winces when he stares into the sunlight pouring in earnest through the floor to ceiling window behind Vidic's desk.

"It's okay," Lucy says. "It's a natural reaction. All the other subjects experienced something similar. If you'd like, you could avoid looking at your reflection."

"Yeah." Desmond nods. He flexes his fingers and stares at his hands. The digit is conspicuously present and he doesn't know how that could be. "Sorry."

"It's okay," Lucy says again, and she presses her hand onto his chest, pushing him back down. "Try and relax."

But when he's back in the desert, the sun bouncing off the fountain in the courtyard of the bureau, he sneaks another glance and chills go up and down his spine. Altaïr looks nothing like him. It's jarring to see his face when he expects to see his own.

"Altaïr?" the rafik says.

Desmond hurries inside to the man and doesn't see Altaïr again.

.

Ezio is harder to hide from. There are mirrors in the villa, in the shops, in the brothels, all of Venice is afloat on a mirror and Desmond can't help but see the handsome, olive skinned Italian everywhere he goes.

"Ezio?" Rosa says as Desmond leans over the edge of the gondola and surveys the Assassin looking back at him.

"Hmm?" he replies distractedly.

"What are you looking at?"

He glances up at her. Her face is friendly and open. Her eyes are kind. She reaches for his hand. Desmond feels her warmth and knows that he isn't, not really.

"Look, Rosa," he tells her. She comes to sit beside him and leans into his side, her hands holding onto the edge of the gondola. Her reflection shimmers in the light of the dying sun bouncing off the water.

"What?" she asks.

He glances between their reflections. Ezio, who's long black hair touches the nape of Desmond's neck, whose knuckles are still bruised from that tussle with the guards, whose wrist is stained with dried blood that stretches his skin and pulls at the hairs painfully, looks back at him. He is only dimly aware of the cool table on his back and maybe Lucy standing over him as he sinks deeper into the Animus. More real is the sunset and the smell of the water and the reassuring weight of the hidden blade on his arm. More real is the reflection of the Italian where his is supposed to be.

"Nothing," he says, and he takes her hand and focuses all his attention on her skin and that he isn't really touching it at all.

.

Connor pulls his blade out of the redcoat's throat and Desmond catches a flash of russet skin and narrowed brown eyes. He wipes some of the blood on the uniform of his victim and surveys his reflection.

"Connor," a recruit calls behind him. "We should go, the redcoats are coming."

Desmond tears his gaze from the blade and to the recruit. "What?"

"The redcoats, Connor," another recruit says, a ways away. "We need to leave now."

He hears marching, steady and strong feet making contact with the rough dirt of the open, wild frontier. A shadow shifts beside him. His recruit is hiding behind a tree, snuffing out his lantern. Desmond's eyes narrow to adjust to the darkness. A full moon is all the light they have, illuminating big feet in worn boots and hands that are too large and too calloused to be his own.

Of course not, he reminds himself. I am Connor now.

But in the thick of the woods, in an America that is as foreign to him as an alien planet, he doesn't feel like Connor. He doesn't even feel like Desmond.

"Connor, we have to leave, now!" the recruit's voice is urgent.

"Desmond?" Shaun's voice reaches him as though from the end of a long, winding tunnel. "Stay in sync. Move."

The moon is bright, bright enough for him to catch another glimpse of his reflection on the blade. A scarred cheek. Thick, black hair. He would have thought he'd be used to it by now but it still jars him.

"Desynchronization imminent," Rebecca says, and then he's drawing in breath after breath on the cool Animus table.

Shaun descends upon him in an instant. "Could you please, please fucking focus?" he asks sharply, at once polite and incorrigibly rude. "I'm so sorry to have to be the one to tell you that you aren't playing a video game, you're searching for a way to stop the apocalypse."

"I know," he responds, irked, rubbing his eyes then pulling his hand back to look at it, the familiar creases on his palm, his palm, not Connor's.

"Lay the hell off." Rebecca nudges Shaun away roughly, and he mumbles darkly under his breath as he wanders further into the cavern. She gives Desmond a sympathetic smile. He wants to return it but can't seem to make the right muscles move and in the end it looks like a grimace.

"Whenever you're ready," she says.

He would kill for a drink. Anything at all, even rubbing alcohol, just something to burn down his throat and wake him up a little. But he asks for water and she brings him a plastic cup full. He catches a glimpse of himself on the surface. It surprises him that he finds his own reflection staring quizzically back at him. What the hell had he been expecting?

Desmond Miles. He almost laughs. He isn't Desmond Miles, not anymore. This close to the end of everything, and here he is having a case of early onset midlife crisis. It's hilarious. And depressing. And enough to make him set the water aside, untouched, and dive back into the memories of an ancestor who is dust in the ground somewhere.

Dust or not, they are more real to him than he has ever been to himself.

He wipes the side of his blade on the coat of the fallen redcoat and hears the marching, steady as the beat of his heart, coming closer, ever closer.

"Connor!" a recruit hisses. "They're coming!"

Desmond pulls himself up and darts up into a tree. Big hands hold steady to the branch he's sitting on, and worn leather boots dangle down below him. Across the dirt path, the recruit waves at him.

"You okay in there?" Rebecca's voice whispers into his ear.

The redcoats are directly underneath him now. He has a second, maybe two.

"I'll be fine," he whispers back.

He sees Connor's face in the reflection of his blade and it's smiling.

He thinks he may be smiling too when he descends upon the redcoats in a flurry of bullets and shouts of surprise and the cool press of the table on his back.


End file.
